High School Students

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

The day begins around 7 a.m., at the back of the house, in a room outfitted with rows of fluorescent lights, a ping-pong table and little else. This is where Ariel Hsing comes to practice alone. She starts by crouching silently at one end of the table, then springs up and, with a flick of her paddle, sends a serve whizzing across the net. The 16-year-old repeats this motion hundreds of times, the balls collecting against a far wall. She must concentrate on hitting with maximum spin, but other thoughts occasionally creep in. Thoughts of precalculus and English composition.

Counting the days until summer vacation starts, students at Brea-Olinda High School who are hoping a job will fall into their laps may be in for a bit of a jolt. Normally, the Orange County school's job board is stocked with 25 to 30 notices from prospective employers this time of year. This spring, however, there are only half as many job offers on the board. "We haven't been getting a lot of calls from business people," said Jim McWilliam, the school's career guidance specialist.

As they do on many Saturday afternoons, the teenagers from across Los Angeles county descended on the nondescript Fairfax district office building. It was time for the weekly editorial meeting at L.A.Youth the newspaper by teens for teens. The latest issue had just hit the hallways of L.A. schools, and the deadline for the next one was fast approaching. As more than a dozen students sat around a square of folding tables, Amanda Riddle, one of the adult editors, kicked things off with a question: What did they know about Trayvon Martin?

At South Gate High, teen-agers are lining up to have babies. Students in a teen-age pregnancy prevention program--the only one of its kind in Los Angeles County--spend several days lugging around frighteningly lifelike baby dolls that wail at unpredictable intervals. The $220, computer-controlled "baby" with a recording of a newborn's cries cannot be quieted unless properly cuddled and "fed" by inserting a key into its monitoring device.

A worker in Inglewood sprays an office with a semiautomatic handgun, killing two. A former employee rakes the Caltrans yard in Orange with an assault rifle, killing four. A man in pastoral upper Ojai guns down two neighbors, the latter in front of her shrieking 3-year-old. A rifle-wielding father in suburban Simi Valley chases his wife and three children, shooting all to death. A Huntington Beach man slaughters five.

Valley College opened its doors, robotics laboratory and broadcasting studios Tuesday and today to some 600 high school seniors from around the Valley during senior days, designed to display the school's facilities and acclimate teens to the college atmosphere.

The nation's high school seniors are all but clueless when it comes to understanding essential truths about America's past, according to test results released Thursday. To many of them, the Boston Tea Party, the Civil War and World War II are dimly understood events from a foggy past. And that is particularly worrisome in a post-Sept. 11 climate as Americans are being forced to defend their values and country, educators said. A 2001 U.S.

The 80 students who study work experience under career counselor Barney Davis at Point Loma High School consider his classes a godsend. The once-a-week course enables them to satisfy the school district's graduation requirements that all students take a sixth course each semester, while freeing them all other days to go to their part-time jobs early.

Like many honor students with dreams of going to an Ivy League university, Burton Liao has been taking a test preparation course to boost his scores on college entrance exams. But unlike his classmates in the summer program, Liao has plenty of time left to learn SAT vocabulary words and score-boosting strategies before the big test day arrives. He's only 13 years old.

Re "Clear the tracks, Beverly Hills," Editorial, April 21 Ever since Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) prevented our subway from being finished by pushing though a ban on federal funds for tunneling under Wilshire Boulevard on the Westside, we have lost our chance to have an efficient way of getting around our city. New York has one of the most efficient transportation systems in our country, and yet we who live and work in Los Angeles continue to wait for our subway to be finished.

They were not even born at the time their city erupted in flames, violence and rage against a system that would not convict Los Angeles police officers of brutally beating a black man. But high school students Jiaya Ingram, Ashley Torres and Jessica Maldonado have been gripped by accounts of the 1992 Los Angeles riots as they learn about them through poetry and plays, readings and recollections of their parents and others. They say they felt shock over police actions, horror over the mob violence and an uneasy feeling that it could happen again, particularly as unarmed African Americans are killed, most recently in Florida, Oklahoma and Pasadena.

Occupy Movement protests planned for colleges nationwide attracted modest yet passionate crowds at California campuses on Thursday as participants decried state budget cuts to education and the resulting hikes in tuition. No arrests were reported around the state, and most academic schedules were not disrupted by the rallies. However, many classes at UC Santa Cruz were canceled as about 200 demonstrators blocked vehicle access to the campus. A motorist attempting to drive through the crowd struck several protesters, but no one was seriously injured, officials said.

It's more than a little ironic that the same Arizona Legislature that spearheaded a ruthless, racially charged campaign against illegal immigrants also banned K-12 ethnic studies classes on the grounds that they promote hatred and division. Who knew Arizona's Republican majority, as expert as it is at hyperbole and invective, was so committed to fostering healthy race relations in the Grand Canyon State? Last month, after a court fight against the ban, the governing board of the Tucson Unified School District pulled the plug on its Mexican American studies program, which teachers say was designed to help middle school and high school students navigate in a complex, multiethnic world.

The two groups of high school protesters — one dressed as graduates with caps and gowns, the other donning orange jail jumpsuits — huddled together outside Van Nuys City Hall on Monday chanting: "Pre-med! Pre-jobs! Not pre-prison!" Inside, a special meeting of the City Council's Public Safety Committee discussed a proposal that would strike down a long-standing law allowing police to cite students who are late to class. About 100 high school students dressed up to depict what they called the criminalization of students for tardiness.

Hundreds of high school students lined up outside Roybal Learning Center near downtown Los Angeles on Saturday in letterman jackets and the kind of windbreakers worn by Olympians. Members of the Van Nuys High School team had black paint streaked on their cheeks like savage warriors heading into battle. Instead, the students marched into the school's gymnasium to answer questions about colonization, wars and imperialism as part of the Los Angeles Unified School District's regional Academic Decathlon competition.

It's mid-June. School's out. Now what? For college students, the answer is almost anything. Bolstered by a resurgent economy, the number of summer jobs and internships available to area college students is approaching pre-recession highs, job analysts said. And many positions are still unfilled. Creative college students can finagle summer jobs, especially unpaid ones, in almost any field through perseverance and networking.

Sixteen San Gabriel Valley high school students participated in Kaiser Permanente's Summer Youth Program this year. The six-week program began July 6 and ran through Aug. 13. Students are placed in Kaiser Permanente's San Gabriel Valley facilities where they observe a variety of departments ranging from family practice to administration to pharmacy. In addition, students also attend a series of job search workshops and career awareness presentations.

On the first day of the semester, Sylmar High math teacher Cesar Fuentes wasted no time: " Ven, tomen una computadora ," he said. "Go grab a laptop. " In minutes, the students flipped open the Apple computers, the lights went down and, like a digital textbook, the geometry curriculum popped onto the white board — every word written in Spanish. At Sylmar and three other high schools in Southern California, instructors are running some of the state's only rigorous bilingual math and science classes using online curriculum from Mexico.

For weeks, South Pasadena High School senior Alex Hom knew he wanted to ask freshman Brooke Drury to winter formal. But it wouldn't do to just pop the question — too boring — or, even worse, to text it. So he rounded up more than 20 friends, supplied them with red roses, choreographed a dance routine and wrote out his plea on signs. Then he had a friend bring Brooke, blindfolded, to a spot on campus for the big production. "I thought, this is my senior year and I gotta go out with a bang," Alex said.